The Legend of Sleepy Harlow by Kylie Logan Page B

going to have to haul them all into jail last night.”
    “Kate showed a great deal of restraint.”
    “Except I heard she and Noreen had a rip-roaring fight before that.”
    “You’re not saying—?” Of course he wasn’t. Rather than take the bait, I bit my tongue and stepped around him and to the front of the apartment. There, three tall windows looked toward the Orient Express across the street, the now-closed restaurant where Peter Chan had been killed the spring before. I ignored the memory of Peter’s dead eyes staring up at me from behind the front counter where I discovered his body and, instead, forced myself to picture what Sleepy might have seen when he looked out his front windows.
    A milk truck, maybe?
    A deliveryman bringing blocks of ice?
    Swimmers in their knee-length bathing suits made of scratchy wool. Fishermen with their gear. The plume of steam rising out of the funnel of one of the ferries that, back in the day, plied the waters between Detroit and Put-in-Bay, jammed with jaunty day-trippers.
    “See anything interesting?” Levi’s voice came from right behind me.
    “Just thinking about what Sleepy may have seen when he looked out these windows.”
    “Probably visions of money dancing in his head.” Levi chuckled. “From what I heard, the place that used to be the Orient Express—”
    “Was a bait and tackle shop before that.”
    “And probably a dozen other things between then and back when Sleepy lived here. But back in those days, I hear it was a speakeasy.”
    “Really?” This was news to me, and I wondered if Marianne knew it and talked about it in her book. Don’t get me wrong, I know in my head that Prohibition spawned any number of criminal enterprises, and some of them were ruthless and violent. Just ask Sleepy. But like a lot of people, I couldn’t help but be caught up in the romance of the speakeasy, an illegal hideaway where you needed the friends—and the right password—to get by security and into a place where you could purchase and drink liquor.
    These days, it all seems so impossible, but in the thirteen years that it was the law of the land, Prohibition—what President Herbert Hoover once called the Noble Experiment—made it impossible to manufacture, sell, or transport beer, wine, and liquor.
    Legally, that is.
    That didn’t stop criminals like Charlie Harlow or the thousands of others who made gin in their bathtubs or smuggled booze over the borders and into the US.
    “What do you think?” I asked Levi. “Do you suppose Sleepy brought the booze here, then simply walked it across the street to the speakeasy?”
    “That doesn’t seem like the smartest plan, even for back in the nineteen twenties before there were any sophisticated surveillance techniques.” The furniture in the living room was cushy leather, a couch and chair, both black. There was a TV on the wall opposite the bookshelves and a glass and metal coffee table in front of the couch that was scattered with sports and restaurant management magazines, a remote control, and an iPad. Levi perched on the arm of the couch.
    “From what I’ve heard some of the old-timers at the bar say, there are supposed to be caves around the island where the smugglers stored their booze.”
    It made sense. After all, as the ghost getters had so recently reminded me, South Bass is made up of limestone, and there are caves all over the island. “So he’d bring in the booze—”
    “Probably from Middle Island, north of here,” Levi said, then shrugged and glanced at his iPad. “All right, I admit it. After you told me Sleepy used to live here, I was intrigued. I did a little online research about Prohibition in these parts. The island was a hotbed of activity.”
    “We’re less than ten miles from Canadian waters.”
    “Exactly. Which means Sleepy and other bootleggers like him could easily pick up alcohol in Canada, where it was perfectly legal, and bring it back here, where it was illegal and all the